Online Chat is a social problem, not just a technical one

People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option. At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale. #Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values. #Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something. The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons,…